Stop Blasting. Start Automating. It's Time to Rethink Your Shopify Email Game

Jay: [00:00:00] Rytis, it's so good to have you on the show. First of all, before we start, I would personally like to thank you because this is the first time you're coming on our show as the first sponsor of the Shopify 1% podcast. And I just want to give a bit of background to listeners. I know sometimes, we mentioned this in the show notes, and actually a lot of our listeners use Omnisend.

I was talking to someone a couple weeks ago and, they told me they installed it because they heard it on the show and they loved it and so, I've used Omnisend for. I don't even know how long. Probably seven years. So I manage a few stores, some family members. We use Ominsend on all of them, and When we decided that we wanted to have a few sponsors on the show, not a ton, but handpick a few. Omnisend was the first phone call I made. Because the way I wanted to approach it was I wanted to only allow sponsors of products I use. That's just kind of a personal thing, but you know, [00:01:00] it's not necessarily about money for the sponsorship that helps pay for all of the hosting and everything else, but it's products that I believe in. So Omnisend is one of my favorite email and SMS tools and such an honor to have you on the show. Thank you 

Rytis: thank you Jay, for such a kind words, welcoming words and as well as welcoming us, inviting us to become a sponsor. And of course, as we know each other for quite many years. Since we were beginning, early days on Shopify, Bold was an inspiration for us as well that okay

we can do, we can build things and understand. It was , really early days startup and really thank you for your kind words and really great to know you and yeah.

Jay: It's fine, people like you. I think make the ecosystem of partners better, and for those that don't know. So Bold, we've started building with Shopify in 2012. When did Omnisend officially Launch? 

Rytis: 2014. Yeah, Shopify was probably second or third integration we made. It was like maybe [00:02:00] mid 2014 or end of 2014 when we started with Shopify.

Jay: So both of us are over 10 years in the space and if you're listening right now and you just started building on Shopify in the last two years, You have no idea what it was very, very different space. I know just from number of merchants to what was even possible to do on Shopify.

Rytis and I have both seen a lot and anyways,

Rytis: It used to be shop big Shopify United events, which. I miss them, to be honest. Not sure about you. Like more for developers with this new event. But I kind of miss Mill Sue's massive united events and different kind of, representatives and merchants alongside gathering together, you know, talking about all things Shopify, about e-commerce in general.

I think this is kind of one of the. I understand COVID kind of, we tried to make it virtual, but that's what they miss from early days.

Jay: Yeah, no, I totally agree. And hopefully that comes back 'cause that was a definitely a good thing. So, there is a lot that we can get into on this [00:03:00] show. And you know you're founder and CEO of Omnisend, which is like my preferred email and SMS solution by far for Shopify. So I definitely wanna pick your brain on some marketing and email and SMS strategies, but just because I know that almost all of our listeners are also founders, they're also startup companies.

I want to dig into a little bit into your story. I think it's pretty inspirational and you've grown an amazing company. So I wanna talk a bit about that and then definitely pick your brain a little bit on some advice for some of our listeners

Rytis: Sure, let's do it.

Jay: Can we start at the beginning, what was going back before Omnisend, tell me the story of how Omnisend came to be.

Rytis: So, maybe we'll not start like super early days, but Omnisend is my third startup attempt. I failed Twice prior to Omnisend and it was a spinoff as well from digital marketing agencies. So after second failure, I got back to more Traditional kind of business. So basically [00:04:00] used to run digital marketing agency, building websites, online stores, Facebook apps.

It used to be back in the days, super popular. They used to have like different applications on Facebook, et cetera. And some running, some marketing opinions on behalf of customers as well. It was not even the core of our business, but that's how we spotted the opportunity of email.

Marketing back in the days for those who sell online, for online merchants specifically. And so, I started my first business being 20. Okay. I did not start, I was invited to join and I was a smaller co-founder. We were two, but just the person I knew from my secondary school just gave me a call.

I said, look, I have an idea. What do you think about. You know, started the business. I said, okay, let's do it. It sounds fun. I'm gonna be, businessman, business owner.

Jay: yeah. You make business cards.

Rytis: Yeah. So, you know, many lessons learned, since then. And that's a nice journey. I truly believe that, you know, it's [00:05:00] those success stories, that someone starts a very successful company being 18, but those are superior. I mean. we hear about them so much, but if we take the population of billions of people, it's like they are super outliers. But I believe like just, in going your own path, making your own mistakes, learning your own lessons, and at some point the success will come.

Jay: Well, you've certainly seen success. I feel with Omnisend, and I know you don't share everything, but some numbers you've shared publicly that I know you're okay with. And so you've bootstrapped Omnisend,

Rytis: Correct.

Jay: First of all, for those listening means you didn't raise money, which, every one these days has an idea, builds a little proof of concept, and then goes out and tries to raise a few million dollars to build the idea, you built it all without raising any money, and you've grown on Omnisend to 50 [00:06:00] million ARR annual recurring revenue, which I don't know for sure, but that's for sure in the top 1%.

I bet that's in the top 0.01% of. Shopify apps that are doing, I guarantee that's in the top 0.1%. And then if you said, what companies are doing that level of revenue that are bootstrapped? I don't know of another one. I can't think, like judge me and some of these others are in that same category and, but their numbers are quite a bit less. They're extremely successful.

And what you've done is 

Rytis: absolutely incredible. Thank you

Jay: Of course! well So tell me, why did you decide to bootstrap? Why didn't you raise money?

Rytis: I tried or we tried. I'm co-founder. We are two founders. So we tried to raise and then this kind of a story that I'm vocal about, but you know back in the days, once we launched like 11 years ago? Yeah. On the end and start. Fundraising. Everybody was you're gonna do [00:07:00] what? Email? Come on.

I sometimes felt like I'm pitching a leather of shoes and then and trying to convince investors that this is innovation. You know, I'm gonna be making an email marketing solution. Something similar as like MailChimp. Back in the days, MailChimp.

Jay: So like email was done?

Rytis: Exactly, exactly.

Jay: like who needs another email solution 

Rytis: Done deal. Crazy done deal.

It was like super conversational commerce was a big, buzzword back in the days. And then chats, et cetera. So yeah, people will be you know, advertised and retained through chats. Messenger, WhatsApp, whatever else is in the market, et cetera. And conversation commerce.

People will stop going to websites to browse online stores. They will just ask a product, et cetera. And that's okay. This is how the true innovation happens, but we kind of like believe that those who sell online email is highly effective channel and this will remain the same because this is the inbox.

Actually, you as a consumer, you in the full [00:08:00] controller of the inbox, you can you subscribe to, let's say, BOLD newsletters, et cetera. And of course, nobody reads each and every newsletter which is the subject lines, the context around you.

If you are super busy today, you just ignore, but maybe the next you will see it. After one week you will open and you will engage and you will purchase, et cetera. So we kind of strongly believed then. Okay, we failed in fundraising, like we raised a little bit from early business angels.

Fools friends and family.

Jay: Fools. I love that.

Rytis: or maybe friends, family and fools.

So we raised in this category, But we were lucky enough to become profitable soon enough too. To pay off as it was in the format of convertible notes, bonds. And we just basically paid back as debt with interest and that's it.

Yeah. So that was kind of like an organic decision. And after that we just felt in love with bootstrapping and not fundraising. And furthermore, internally we call it being customer funded. That's the term that I love more than bootstrapping [00:09:00] because you know, our customers, they pay us month over month.

And each month we make a decision and they pay us in advance for one month. So each month we make a decision if we believe that Omnisend gonna create value in upcoming month and pay their bills off basically, some of customers sometimes lose this trust and then we churn.

So it really kind of makes ourselves the entire team engineers, marketers, support people, et cetera.

Just really, really to be customer centric and focus on customer needs because we all understand that our salaries will be paid by the customers who today make a decision if they still believe in Omnisend, if we still create value for them. So this is how we fund our growth as well.

Jay: you're basically validating. Product and validating what you're building every step of the way versus Raising $10 million. We see some slight product market fit in [00:10:00] in this one area.

And now we're going all in and then it doesn't work. And I can't hear that every single day with some startups, but you, month by month, were validating what you were building. Otherwise you would have micro pivots, 

Rytis: Exactly

Jay: like you're sending a plane across the globe, it's every month adjusting

Rytis: Yeah. Going by car those bumpy roads, yeah. So this is kind of a mindset and then after some years we really felt in love with this mindset and with this concept. And continue doing this. And as it's stated in your background, just trying to be 1% better every day.

It's not that much per day, but it really compounds per year and per 10 years, et cetera. So, you know, our philosophy and, now the fact that we are customer funded, it's even like probably the first, maybe the second statement in our values and culture deck.

So it's now really embedded into the entire philosophy and the mindset of the entire Omnisend crew.

Jay: That's so good. I respect that so much. We, just at Bold. We were [00:11:00] very similar. We did end up eventually, raising money in 2019, but from 2012.

Part of it was because we're in the middle of the prairies in Canada, there is not a lot of investment. There's fools and friends and family, but that's it. There's not the large VC community. And so we didn't even think about raising money. We just thought, okay, how can we work at our jobs as long as possible, build this idea, get the idea going, then literally each month would look at, can we hire a person?

Rytis: no

Jay: Next month. Okay yeah, we can hire a person, work for a couple months.

Oh, we can hire two people now. And it was, we would always say we hired behind growth and we grew the company that way for seven years to 2019, I think we were around 200 people and we started getting investors knocking on our door. 

Wanting to fuel what we were doing. And the reason we said yes was we viewed it as, not using the money to start a fire, [00:12:00] but using 

Rytis: to fuel the fire

Jay: And so, because we had kind of figured out it was working, but, I have a ton of respect for that. And it's amazing. Like now you have control of the company, right?

Like you can,

Rytis: It's good and bad. Sometimes it's good to have some external pressure,

Jay: For sure, and do you have an advisory board

Rytis: No, formalized. so there's no for formal board, but just I do peer to peer conversations and there is a group of peers, some of them are from, from e-commerce, some of them are from other industries, but tech industries, mainly startups.

And some of them are larger and we, which is always great. So kind of different people and have like routine meetings and we just challenge each other a little bit. And then this is how we learn as well. And this is how I get inspirations for ourself. Like, okay, come on, we did this, it worked for them.

Okay, shall we try something like this as well? But sometimes you have doubt so this is kind of my unofficial board and we never gather it together. But, those conversations, those meetings [00:13:00] 

Jay: well and that kind of checks a lot of the boxes that a board I mean, there's some other things as far as like governance and other stuff, but like actual, holding you accountable and challenging ideas and challenging strategies and stuff. So as long as that's getting done in some way,

Rytis: I think

Jay: that's, all that matters, right?

Rytis: It works.

Jay: yeah. for anyone listening right now who is considering raising money to grow their business, do you have any advice for, I was gonna say early stage founders, but at any stage with their e-commerce store. So our listeners merchants, Uh, any advice for them?, 

Rytis: my advice would be, go as far as you can or as far as you like. And exactly to what you said about BOLD. That at some point you start, getting investors knocking at your doors and then you can raise more or less on your terms.

'cause while you are new, while you are just starting and there's no still clear proof of product market fit, et [00:14:00] cetera. You go and you raise on their terms. And you basically spend so much time trying to convince someone that you are doing a good product, et cetera. So if you can't really go further on your own foot, like, fund yourself from free apps, et cetera, that would really, really put you in a better position for, for two reasons.

One is just because if you will make a decision to fundraise, you will. Do it on way better terms. And the second thing, I still believe it really unleashes your creativity. The constant shortage. And I think you've kind of had the same feeling, especially in those initial years, 7 years when you bootstrap.

So that constant shortage of resources really helps you to think way more creatively. To act way more creatively and the fact that you raise 10 or 50 or 100 [00:15:00] million, it's very, very tricky because you feel, I never felt it just my theoretical thinking, or what I saw from Friends, and then colleagues who raised. It kind of makes a misperception that, okay, the resources are unlimited now.

It's still very limited. And it's so easy to burn tens of millions so fast without even putting the company to the next level. So I think it's kind of very tricky part here. And you have to be really be ready to do this. I mean, if it really fuels up and if you succeed and that's great.

But there are a lot of situations when raising good. Be not the best. What happened to you and your new company

Jay: yeah, here's another way to think about it. I heard someone say this once. If you wanna do something innovative, restrict resources, restrict time, and restrict money.

Rytis: Exactly.

Jay: if you have too much resources, too much time, too much money. Nothing innovative ever happens.

Rytis: Yes.

Jay: You know, it always blows me away in a [00:16:00] couple weeks. We do our hackathons call them innovator day at Bold. So we give like everyone a,

Rytis: Nice.

Jay: it used to be three days. This one we're actually doing a full week.

Rytis: Wow. Do you lock them down? Do you lock everyone down or do you work still? Work days.

Jay: Well we used to do it in the office and people bring like cots and airmatresses and stay overnight.

And we had people going by with drink carts full of like food and pizza and redbull and not everyone stayed overnight but a lot of people did. We never like forced anyone, but they did it willingly 'cause it was fun and there's always the theme. This particular theme is our whole company is taking a week off to investigate ai.

I mean, we're all familiar with AI but it's how can it be built into our products, how can we use it in our processes? How can we use it in our roles? How can we leverage AI with partners? Just like everything encompassing, and so the whole company is taking it, I mean , we always have a theme for these hackathons.

This one covers every single role, like people on our HR team. Can [00:17:00] be using AI for screening applicants and doing research on applicants and whatever. it's always blows my mind. My point was, whenever we do these hackathons, it blows my mind what gets done in three or four days.

Rytis: That's amazing. 

Jay: Prior to that, we have large teams and we have standups and meetings and review processes. And sometimes I look at something that got built and I'm like, oh man, that took like a month. That's crazy.

Rytis: Absolutely agree.

Jay: But when you have these hackathons, it's like you have less time, less resources. It's like, how can we do a minimal viable version of whatever we're building?

We meet after go through every project, well, they're presented at a town hall. Everyone presents what they built. And then after we meet and we go through and we say like, which ones do we want to ship or put a team on and actually build out.

And it, it blows my mind how many of them are like, wow, this is like 50% of the way there. It's basically done. It needs some of the UX and UI to be fixed up a little bit. But, amazing. 

I think that point you said is really important that it's really easy to think that. Money [00:18:00] is gonna solve that next stage of growth. I've so many times seen the exact same thing and I couldn't agree more. That less time, less money, and less resources makes you be more creative and more innovative.

Rytis: And to what you said. Yeah. So have those hackathons. We have days, so let's say we used to have last year we had like usability days. Yeah. So kind of in all the engineers, all the product teams, they gather for one day just no other tasks, no routine stuff but you have to solve as many as possible usability improvement, UX improvement tasks, et cetera.

So, and they kind of like, that's to what you say, they crazy, just ship like, you know, tons of improvement. 

I love that theme, usability 

Jay: anything that people using Omnisend,

Rytis: User interface improvements sometime very minor, some bad animation , maybe more clear, error definitions, which are kind of no, dead end states. Basically kind of remove all the dead end [00:19:00] states. It maybe stuff's not happening and just, all of us in our products we have, unfortunately it was an error Caught.

Yeah.

Yeah, maybe not the main ones, but still there are some edge cases, but if all combine all of those edge cases, there are quite a lot of them, you know, and just like some very clear examples here, we used to have, now we've kind of, we improved it and we shifted a little bit.

Now we have AI days and to what you say, we just have one single day, but you have to do something with ai and it's all like organization related, like to the customers or to ourselves as well? Both. Both works and both acceptable for this. So just to improve your work to improve your routine or, to improve the customer's experience.

Alongside what we are currently going through, we have six weeks sprint, half of our product organization, they have some constraints but a lot of freedom in that box and basically to ship AI features for customers,

And we understand that potentially [00:20:00] some of them.

Or maybe all of them could need to be thrown away, but that's okay. That's what we accept. Exactly to what you say, just limiting resources. Those are people. This is a time constraint and then be creative. I mean, we remove all the other tasks from your, all the other headaches.

Okay. Minimize, sometimes it's impossible to remove everything for six weeks. You can do it for one day or maybe five days. But just limit or everything else and just very clear constraints. Go create something.

Jay: You know, someone might be listening to this right now and thinking, wow, this doesn't apply to me. I run an e-commerce store. I'm not a tech company, but I would actually challenge everyone listening

Rytis: Oh, it does apply.

Jay: That this can apply to any company.

Rytis: Exactly.

Jay: You think about your shopify store right now. And if you just gave your team that team might be just you, that team might be 10 people, that team might be 20, whatever.

But if you gave your [00:21:00] team, Hey, we're gonna give everyone two days to improve, to pick a project you wanna work on there, there's always these things hanging in the back of your head. It's like. We've been meaning to add a form on our website to collect testimonials, video testimonials to use as UGC content. And I just gotta build out the page. I'm like, or some, some passion project like that.

Take two days and call it user experience, improvements or pick a theme. I think that is super relevant for e-commerce merchants 

Rytis: Absolutely.

Jay: not just for tech companies. 

Rytis: No, not all. And you know what happened after we started having those usability days? So basically engineer like product and engineering teams attended those, but other departments, other teams start the making their own. Days, and they only improved their way of work. They took their hr, administration, marketing.

They just take their process to what you said. And because [00:22:00] all of us, like people, we get into routine and we get stuck in the routine. And sometimes you have to make a decision. That this is my conscious decision that next Friday, whatever happens, I will not. Maybe if there's some kind of super, super extraordinary fire, I will react.

Otherwise, I will not do the routine stuff. I clean my calendar. And to what you say, just all of us, all business owners, all marketers, all managers, we always have more ideas than time and resources to implement. If it's an opposite, maybe you should quit your job. I would say maybe find new challenges.

Jay: Yeah.

Rytis: But if it's not, the backlog in your mind is always there. So just make a pause, dedicate time and make improvements. Thematic, it really helps just set the fee. It really helps not to know. Then you have 10, 100 ideas. Sometimes it's very difficult to pick which one, but when you think about the theme, you narrow down [00:23:00] to 10 ideas.

You challenge, I score, let's say them or whatever, have a methodology to prioritize. Pick one that you can implement in one or two days. And it compound. If you make it as a habit once per month in 12 months, then the change will be massive.

Jay: We used to do them once a year and we saw so much value that we started doing them twice a year. Now we do them three times a year and it's funny that some companies, I talk to friends that they work at like bigger corporations and stuff. They're like, I could never convince my company to take three days off to let everyone do whatever they want to do. That would be such a waste of time. I'm like "well no, we see it as the opposite". It's not a waste

Rytis: Exactly.

Jay: it's actually one of the most valuable times of the year. So I think it boils down to this. We're all out there chopping down trees with an axe. We're chopping and we're chopping, and we're chopping and we're working so hard, and sometimes you gotta take an hour and stop chopping and [00:24:00] sharpen the axe,

Rytis: Exactly. 

Jay: and the you cut down trees twice as fast.

And we all have to do that. And maybe if there's one takeaway listeners get from this is you're chopping hard, you're working on your store, you're answering emails, you're packing boxes, you're answering phone calls. What can you do to take a day or two to speed things up.

Maybe that's something with ai 

Rytis: especially with. I can bet there's so much space for improvements. Yeah. Chopping. I have another analogy which is exactly the same meaning, but turning the squared wheel basically, and it's very hard to turn the square wheel, but I have no time to stop and to make myself a circle wheel, you know?

Jay: I love that analogy. That's great.

Rytis: I'm super busy now. But just don't have the right tool to work efficiently. And it's better to stop, to pause to do that. So completely agree with what you say.

Jay: And here's one tip I'll give people. So everyone's at different levels of comfortableness with ai, and some people are using it [00:25:00] already in every process. They do. Some people are just using it for kind of edge cases here and there. when we told our company that we're gonna have this week long hackathon on ai, a number of people said, I already use CHATGPT, I ask it questions all the time.

I don't know, what am I gonna do? right?

I said "Well Ask ai". one person was one of our executive assistants, right? And she does use chat GPT every day. And I said, we'll, type into chat GPT. Just say "I'm an executive assistant, this is the company I work for, This is my role. How could I leverage AI to better do my job, be more efficient?"

And it came out with a whole list of ideas of like, you can use AI to reprioritize calendars, to shuffle meetings based on priority rank to create action items from meeting notes, assign it in Trello or whatever you use. And then we looked at it and we're like, holy cow. There's a lot. So for those listening, if you ask AI what you can use AI for, I know that [00:26:00] sounds very meta, but literally go to chat GPT and say, this is my store.

This is my URL, this is what I sell, this is the market I'm in. These are the channels I'm selling in. I have ads on Instagram, Facebook, I sell through. Amazon and Pinterest or whatever else like this is what I'm doing. How could I leverage AI to improve some of these processes? And it'll give you back seven to 10 great ideas. So the beauty of AI is you don't even have to come up with the ideas, let it do it all, and then take one of those ideas and then go back to it and say, this is a great idea. Can you give me a breakout of the tools I would use and the steps to take to implement this? 

Rytis: on top of that to what you just said, you can ask to analyze your competitors. "What do they do right?" And I have no doubt, they will CHATGPT, Gemini, whatever tool use cloud. It'll come with ideas. And you will see maybe we don't do this, maybe we not do that, et cetera.

And you should not take everything. you can handpick then to prioritize.

Jay: Yeah, we could get on [00:27:00] Ai. My mind is going in a hundred different places right now and I wanna make sure we talk about email too, cause I feel like even if people just listen 

Rytis: got that

Jay: a takeaway, I think that's huge.

Rytis: Yeah.

Jay: you know, on the competitor front, we sometimes say, here's five competitors, analyze their website based on this type of marketing principle, and create copy that counteracts and addresses their selling points to position us in a certain way. We wanna be 

Rytis: positioned 

Jay: as premium. We want to be positioned as cost effective. like the sky's the limit.

Rytis: Absolutely. And AI comes through email as well. So just like we launched, maybe a couple of weeks ago, et'cetera, like AI segment builder, which is really great. We have subject line, builder, pre-header, we have the copyrights, assistant widget within the email editor now which launched a couple of weeks ago maybe. Segment builder, which probably is kind of the most powerful, what we currently have in the tool. And I love it because usually marketers, they [00:28:00] struggle a little bit with.

Jay: Tell me what a segment is for those listening.

Rytis: for example, a segment of those customers who have email and phone number and bots. In the past three months. So for many years you can build such segment, but it all the logic that marketers have to come with, you just write a prompt, filter me those who have not bought in the past six months, but spend at least 100 bucks

Jay: Oh, that's awesome, I actually haven't seen that 

Rytis: yeah, it's live. Yeah. So we can 

Jay: Because I do lot of segments but I have them all pre-saved like customers who've purchased more than once

Rytis: Just try to prompt, as I said, and it will come with the rules. Of course, as always, with ai you have to review it, challenge it. Sometimes it hallucinates, we did not communicate it very much yet.

It's still better, but it's life. So you can go build it, try it, use it. It's coming to email as well and, I have no doubts ' good old school email will be valid, will be relevant, and will be very effective in the upcoming five, ten [00:29:00] years. But how we use email marketing, how we do email marketing the way will change for sure, because we.

Can get more and more assistance from ai. And this is how we think about the AI directional phenomenon in general. That, we can help as a creator, strategist come up with insights, recommendations, et cetera, but still, the marketer is the boss. He or she makes decisions.

AI recommends Omnisend, recommends Omnisend. AI recommends, but you as a marketer make the final decision. You can approve everything. You can edit something, you can disagree and ask us to come with new suggestions or designs or copyright, et cetera. But this is kind of the vision that we are going towards.

Jay: You know, I wanna go back to something you said. Earlier when you were trying to raise money, 11 years ago, people said email. What? 

Isn't that solved? Or email's dead? Everything now is on social media. It seems like now. Email is more [00:30:00] relevant than ever.

Rytis: Sure. 

Jay: Every single day I am seeing some influencer on social media or LinkedIn or wherever launching a newsletter. Everyone has a newsletter, right? Like that's the sexy thing to do now, is to have a newsletter and that's part of your personal brand.

Rytis: Because this is how you own true relationship with customers. Otherwise it's not you who owns the relationship. It's social media platforms, it's Amazon. Yeah. So a lot of merchants sell both on their D2C stores as well as on Amazon or Walmart, et cetera. But this is the main difference.

Once you have a relationship with customers, you can truly retain them. Otherwise for platforms, you pay again and again to retain your customers. And basically those platforms, they do not retain your customers. They require them again and again, and acquisition is always way more expensive than retention. That happens the same with creators economy, with influencers. Just why email is so sexy, because this is how you start building true relationship with customers and you are not [00:31:00] dependent on algorithms. Because if Instagram or Facebook, we change algorithms constantly.

And one day you are able to reach audience and every day they ask you to pay money for doing this. 

Jay: well that happened, we all built our Facebook pages and

Like our Facebook page, and then all of a sudden your posts were only showing to 1% of people who your page and you had to pay to boost the posts to actually get them in front of audiences. And so the same thing could happen with any other platform right now.

Like it feels like on TikTok and Instagram , or even YouTube. It feels like if you create a good viral post, you don't have to pay for it. The algorithm picks it up. but trust me, like that could very much happen, that organic reach gets throttled and only paid reach reaches a certain amount.

Rytis: true, true.

Jay: Email, SMS are, you own it, it's so important 

Rytis: push notifications as well, really [00:32:00] underrated. Work really well. And the metrics we see those who use the conversion rates are super high. Just the usage. The engagement is super high. Just usage is very low.

So that's probably kind of a thing. Like, email is great. It will remain, but once you augment email with other channels, like SMS, push notifications, we are considering, maybe WhatsApp back in the days we had, messenger. We duplicated those channels. They were not effective enough back in the days, but now seems like WhatsApp is coming back more and more.

And we, we started hearing requests from our merchants, from our customers that we would like to have, especially kind of in some geographical areas. And even in the states, which is main market for us, it's becoming more and more popular, et cetera. So, yeah, augmenting email with other channels really increases the efficiency of communications.

But basically the main goal, the main target is to retain customers, to communicate with them, again and again to bring your message in [00:33:00] front of their eyes. So more channels you combine on single workflows, on single campaigns, on single automations, the more effective your communication is.

Jay: Yeah, when you look at brands today using email, SMS push, what are some of the things that a lot of brands. Even big brands that you look at that they're getting wrong, that you still look at them and like simple, fundamental things maybe, but what are some things that is commonly got wrong.

Rytis: Yeah. Yeah. So too few I know too few automations. 'cause usually, kind of, even established brands, they launch too few automations. Those work really effectively. abandoned cart is it default some. post purchase, maybe, et cetera. But, that's it. And they basically set this part and they forget it.

And they run campaigns. So campaigns are important, but you know, like last year, we generate automated messages, emails. SMS push notifications. [00:34:00] They generated around 40% of revenue for our customers and it contained only 2% of the traffic we send out.

Jay: Wow.

Rytis: the relevancy of those automated messages for your customers, for the shoppers is just insane.

So way fewer messages you are sending towards your customers, but they're way more relevant than the click rates, engagement rates, conversion rates are way, way, way high in comparison to campaigns. 

Jay: So I wanna get this clear for people, a campaign is a one-off 

Rytis: email blast 

Jay: that you send. 

Rytis: correct.

Jay: you have a sale or a promotion, a spring sale, An automation is a series of emails. Trigger based. 

Rytis: Exactly.

Jay: But then it can be 10 emails that get automated 

Rytis: Correct. So thanks for clarifying. 

Jay: No, that's fine, i know the term automations. 

Rytis: to explain for everyone and where the distinction is. So automation workflow is basically, it's like the trigger initiates, the campaign is being initiated by the marketer via the person and it's a [00:35:00] blast.

And the automation automated campaign, automated email, SMS, is being initiated by the trigger by the company. So basically we identify that Jay put some products. Into the shopping cart or just browse some products even prior to putting into a cart, and we identify this and that triggers a campaign.

Okay, let's send a product reminder for Jay after 12 hours, 24 hours, two days, et cetera. If he reads, that's okay, let's push, maybe make it more. Frequent. If he ignores, maybe let's send SMS, let's send other products that lookalike or maybe fits together. And if you are in search of, let's pick some random refrigerator, for example.

Maybe with a wide, wide variety of refrigerators that you could purchase. Yes, we can recommend other products as well, et cetera. And there could be like one message. Which I always recommend put more messages on the same sequence, on the same workflow. Yeah, not [00:36:00] a single reminder, but reminders, three reminders, five reminders.

And there could be different workflows. So when getting back to your original questions, like what is being underused? So usually merchants, we set up, okay, there's a abandoned cart automation workflow, maybe with welcome automation workflow, but there's so many of them. Let's say for example.

Back in stock, you know, all of those who sell online, you sometimes have situations that you are out of stock, leave those products on your webpage, but instead of just sold out message, put the widget, it's in case of Omnisend, let's say it's all automated. We put the widget and the product that is sold out.

We collect email addresses. We have a segment whenever the product is back in stock, which is named just basic as this, you know, there's a trigger. We send emails immediately, and this is kind of like super efficient workflow because you basically invite those who showed that they're interested in this specific product.

You invite them, come back and [00:37:00] purchase because they have such a clear interest. Yeah. This other examples is like all the post-purchase. Communication, which it does usually does not convert straight away, but it shows that you care about customers, or you can convert it like collecting QGC content, collecting reviews, getting, are you happy?

We just, you know, shipped it. Did you receive a parcel? Was it good? Are you happy with a product? Are you happy with a delivery service? If something is wrong, VDL, it could be, pushed to your support center. Call them, oh, we saw that you're not 100% satisfied with a product. So what went wrong? ENPS service, et cetera.

So, those are really, really great opportunities to reengage with your customers again and again. And, yeah. So, you know those customers who do it well, they have 10 automations in place, triggers,

Jay: I just wanna get that stat right. You said less than 2% of the emails sent Omnisend 

are an [00:38:00] automation.

Rytis: Correct. 

Jay: so like, majority of people are using Omnisend. They're just sending campaign, black Friday, cyber monday, independence day sales, they're just doing blasts.

Rytis: Yes,

Jay: Only 2% of the emails sent are automation, but they make up 40%.

Rytis: correct.

of 

Jay: the revenue generated. What 

Rytis: is the math, 

Jay: That's 20 x.

Rytis: correct.

Jay: 20 x revenue. I mean, if there's one takeaway for a listener is set up your fricking automations. 'cause that's insane. Yeah. not just, I mean, I actually am thinking right now of some of the stores that I work with. We're guilty. We have an abandoned cart email that out and I think two, but that's it. There isn't anything else. We might be triggering sms, but not triggering push.

Rytis: so 

Jay: I gotta go back and tune these up a bit here. 'cause

Rytis: Exactly. Exactly. Jay, this is a home for you, you know? 'cause you leave money on the table, you leave money on the table, all those automations and yeah, abandoned cart is [00:39:00] the most popular. So all of those automations you know, they add extra revenue and you just set up and forget, the same as with abandoned cart, it generates revenue. So it's very important to do that.

Jay: So then how does segmentation tie into Automation, I get that now. Segmentation, can obviously send campaigns to different segments. You can build automations with different messages based off segment as that's, I feel like that's a multiplier.

Rytis: sure. Yeah.

Jay: if you're doing automations and layering and segmentations, 

Rytis: Sure.

Jay: how do these work together?

Rytis: Yeah. So for example, let's say automation. You have the one you, you have abandoned cart in mind. So, you can put the segment on top of it and you can bind both if the cart has been abandoned by the first time buyer, the offer is a if cart is being abandoned by the repeated buyer. The offer is B. If the cart is being abandoned by the best buyer who know that spends a lot of you already, maybe you can come with the offer C, and maybe you [00:40:00] can provide either a bigger discount or maybe no discount because you are pretty sure the one will still purchase this because you know that he or she's purchasing from you.

And maybe for first time buy, you can come with a more aggressive, let's say, discount offer, just to convert it.

Jay: do you have any thoughts on that? If it's, is there any data that you know off the top of your head, if it's someone who's never bought from you before, who abandons? Should you offer them a steeper discount than someone who or is there any data around that? 

Rytis: Mean, it doesn't sound like, good for your old customers, but usually that's what happens. You know,

Jay: Right.

It's a risk too, because they might use a different email address and then they find out, Hey, how come I'm not getting, because a lot of people do try game the abandoned cart email as well

Rytis: Yeah, of course. But, usually people they don't gain that much. And this is kind of to what you say, we keep hearing it from our customers. " But maybe I want to be more on the safe side. What if someone games my system? But I usually just very, very few [00:41:00] people who try to do that and let them game, I mean.

Jay: A hundred percent. 

Rytis: They feel so proud about themselves. Oh, I found a loophole. That's okay. But you still purchased from me.

Jay: Meanwhile, they're giving away 10% to everyone who signs up for their email, but they don't wanna give a 10% for an abandoned cart email because they say, oh, someone might just be gaming the abandoned cart, which like adding it to the cart and then waiting an hour. Give them the 10% 'cause you're giving them the 10% discount just for signing up your news letter, you might as well. Right? No, I agree a hundred percent. We people get too hung up on that. Yes, there will be a percentage. I know what it is. 10% of people.

Rytis: It depends on your margin. It depends on, what overall incentives. It could be just very straightforward, just discount. It could be like free shipping. It could be some additional values, and it depends on your business. Each of business has their own incentives policy and, sometimes there are super like slim margins businesses, so you cannot be too aggressive with straightforward discounts, but maybe you can [00:42:00] have some add-ons or bundles.

Jay: Rytis, I wanna get into our quick fire around here because. It's funny, I don't even think I got through half the questions I had for you, but that's okay. We got, we talked about super. Valuable stuff and I'm just gonna have to have you back on at some point because I feel like there's a lot more that we can get into with email marketing using SMS together.

Push. But I know we're, I know we're close to time and you're on the other side of the globe and you've got a family to get to, so I don't wanna take too much of your time, but you're actually the first person we're doing this with. we've got four podcasts in the next two days, and we're starting this, we're asking everyone. These quickfire questions, and it's gonna be fun. We're gonna then later turn them into videos 

Rytis: Nice. Okay. 

Jay: have each person answering and you know, we'll, they'll use them other stuff, but 

Rytis: you're 

Jay: actually the first one And Guinea pig uh yeah you're the Guinea pig, so you can't possibly screw up. And 

Rytis: Perfect. Let's do it. I love it 

lets 

Jay: do it.

Okay Rytis what is one book you'd recommend every [00:43:00] e-commerce founder read?

Rytis: Every founder in general, hard thing about hard things. 

Jay: Ben Horowitz I love that Ben Horowitz It's Yeah. So good.

Rytis: Yeah. The best book about business ever.

Jay: Yeah. What's a recent automation flow? You think every store should try?

Rytis: " back in stock, the one we touched, it's super effective. 

Jay: What is a sacred cow in e-commerce you think merchants need to rethink or challenge?

Rytis: So I think it's just kind of to put more emphasis on retention. I still kind of feel that there's too much emphasis on acquiring new customers. Again, and again and again, and we as a marketers, always too much resources are just reacquiring. Sometimes customers, instead of we would retain them. 

Jay: Yep. Agree a hundred percent. It's interesting. I could talk about this. I agree with you. We see acquisition departments represent like 80% of marketing  budgets and retention only represent 10 to 15%, but the effect on revenue is disproportionate to that. [00:44:00] So it's a lot.

Rytis: Way, way, way, way high on retention

Jay: What do you think separates a one-time buyer brand?

Brands that just get people that buy one and done versus brands that create lifelong ongoing customers? What separates them?

Rytis: quality. Just one word. Quality. Quality of the products you sell, the service that surrounds the, the product, the, the experience, the quality of experience on your website, uh, delivery, et cetera, et cetera. So that's that's the main distinction. Quality.

Jay: I like that. What's one underrated Shopify app you think more merchants should be using?

Rytis: Hmm. Any of Bold apps? I would say probably any, any of those could be, I'm not sure if they're truly underrated, but. Everybody will be using for sure.

Jay: I appreciate that. Thank you. The second last question. If a merchant had only one hour per week to work on their business, where should they spend it?

Rytis: Um, posturing and like learning how to use AI tools to help run [00:45:00] their business more efficiently and you know, scale as persons.

Jay: You know, that says a lot about you, that you didn't say they should be working on email. You are an honest, caring person who's not self-promoting but I would've thought you would've said they should be spending an hour on their email automations, but you know what, that is a very, 

Rytis: Uh, 

Jay: an hour a week working on ai, that would be good 

Rytis: I have no doubts. AI would recommend you that you should do more of your email.

Jay: Because you know what's gonna happen? They're gonna go in exactly. They're gonna ask AI what they should do, and it's gonna 

Rytis: Yeah.

Jay: work on automations. So 

Rytis: Yeah.

Jay: last question. What's one E-commerce metric you think more brands should care about and obsess over, but they don't?

Rytis: Uh, funny enough, but they still think that lifetime value uh, not always the metric that, or even owners are obsessed about.

Jay: Yeah, Such great answers on all of them.

Rytis: Thank you, Jay.

Jay: Rytis, we have, okay, first we're at the end of the show here, but I just [00:46:00] wanna tell listeners we have an offer with Omnisend. So if anyone listening wants to, try Omnisend, which I. Honestly recommend it enough. I'm not even using, listening in this conversation I'm probably only using it to 30% of its even less.

'cause I don't have all the automations. Well, I do have them set up, but not as much as I should. Um, and it is. For a lot of the stores, I run the number one driver of revenue. And it's free revenue. Like we look at what we spend on Facebook and Google ads every month versus what we spend on Omnisend.

And it's maybe 1/1000th the price. So it's so Rytis has put together an for anyone to get 30% off for three months, not just one month for three months. The link for that is in the show notes and or you can just go to Omnisend and you can use the code (JAY30) J-A-Y-3-0 Highly recommend it. And [00:47:00] Rytis, where do you like people to connect with you or to learn more about you and Omnisend

Rytis: So our website, so omnisend.com, uh, or you can ask ChatGPT or Gemini about Omnisend if you wanna learn, but they'll still finally, direct you to our website and. Personally I mainly use LinkedIn as those, my social social media Social network. Social media channel. Yeah. So really invite us to connect there with Rytis Lauris on LinkedIn.

Jay: Are you okay if I put your LinkedIn profile in the comments for people to connect? Okay, 

Rytis: Please do. Thanks Jay.

Jay: Rytiss, thank you so much this has been a ton of fun. I learned stuff. I know our listeners did too. I really appreciate the time.

Rytis: Thanks for inviting.